


Lives at Stake

by myth_taken



Series: Can't Believe It's Not Canon [10]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 20:54:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8300675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myth_taken/pseuds/myth_taken
Summary: Over the years, Slayers have gifted Buffy hundreds of stakes. Most of those Slayers are dead.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is the only sad thing i have written ever

At first, it was just Mister Pointy, and Buffy could deal with that. One stake, a memento of a Slayer gone, a Slayer lost… and, after all, it was a pretty good stake.

But then, just the next year, a new Slayer turned up, and came for Christmas, and Buffy had to miss the present-opening, but she had returned to the tree, long after Faith had gone, to unwrap her present, ripping away layers of messily taped paper to reveal a stake with an obviously hand-carved design.

Mister Pointy had seen plenty of action by then, so Buffy decided to retire it; she hung it on the wall of her bedroom, not willing to let the memory of the slain Slayer rest.

Faith turned evil, and Buffy dusted some of the mayor’s minions with his girl’s stake, but then when Faith was in a coma and all Buffy was was sad, Buffy decided to retire that one too, putting it on the wall with the other before gallivanting off to college.

She thought that was the end of it. Two stakes on the wall, to commemorate two Slayers, and to remind Buffy of what she could have been. A relic of her high school years, and a reminder to make the next Slayer death her own.

But then, two years later, the Potentials came, and they were running all around the house, up and down, into every room, often just looking for a quiet place to sit. Sometimes, Buffy let them use hers, or at least, didn’t get too angry when she caught them sitting on her bed, staring up at the wall. Sometimes one would ask why she had stakes on the wall; after all, didn’t she get enough of that already? And she told them about Kendra and Faith, and the sacrifices they had made, and the stakes they had left behind. She told them how Faith had gone bad, really bad, and now was off trying to fix it; she told them that it was a way to respect the other Slayers she had known.

When Faith arrived, of course, she mocked it: “I didn’t know you valued my love that much, B.” Still, it was friendly, and Buffy could see that Faith really was moved by the gesture. And, in the end, Faith was right; Buffy didn’t know why her stake was up there with a martyr’s, but deep down inside, she knew she couldn’t put it anywhere else. It meant something different, maybe, when it was Faith, but it still meant something.

And then, a week later, a Potential presented Buffy with a stake of her own.

“I know the others all hate you,” she said, “but you do a lot, and I know you don’t use the other gift stakes anymore, so maybe you can use this one.”

Buffy thanked the girl, and she made sure to pack all three stakes into her bag before the final battle. She didn’t know if she’d have a wall to come back to at the end of the day. 

She used the Potential’s stake in the battle, and the girl herself died, and Buffy knew that wherever she lived next, she would have to mount this stake on the wall as well, another memory, this one of lives too young to be lost. 

And so it continued, throughout the years; Buffy had her own house, but one wall of the house was always reserved for the stakes her friends had given her, each one used for a while, and then retired. After a while, the younger Slayers began to consider it a badge of honor to have been close enough to Buffy to have a stake on the wall; the ones she taught, the ones she was closest to, the ones who tried the hardest to do what they could with what they were given, all were represented. Eventually, Buffy started mounting a name beneath each one, and after that, a death date; Kendra’s remained the earliest, with the latest always being far too close to the actual date.

After a while, Willow went out and bought a spool of black ribbon, and she came over and tied black bows around the stakes of the dead Slayers. She said it was to keep track, to remember, but Buffy knew that it was also cautionary: watch out, Summers. One death is one too many, and look how many you’ve allowed.

The day she had to tie a black bow around Faith’s stake was one of the worst of her life. She had helped Faith so much; Faith had been through so much, avoided death so many times. But she had been there, she had seen the vampire thrust his sword into her chest, and she couldn’t do anything about it; not while she was fighting off three of her own.  Yes, Faith had lived longer than most Slayers, even in the new age of Slayer organization and togetherness, but it was still a failure when anyone died of anything other than natural, completely non-mystical, causes.

Eventually, Willow contributed a wand, and Xander chucked in a hammer, as representations of what they did best, and Buffy hung those too, proud that she never had to tie black ribbon around them. Willow and Xander were her closest friends, and Buffy had spent years protecting them, and they had spent years protecting her. They hung on either side of Kendra’s and Faith’s beribboned stakes, above a field of brown wood and black satin. Buffy made sure to clean the stakes as often as she could. It was almost religious; the wall was a shrine to the work that other Slayers had done, and a testament to what Buffy owed the world. All of these girls were out there, fighting so that Buffy might not have to, and some of them had died, and all Buffy had to do was keep them in her heart, keep teaching them what she knew, and maybe someday she would finally be allowed peace.


End file.
